Eastern Front

The Eastern Front during World War II includes the area of military confrontation involving the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Soviet Red Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht clashed along the extended Eastern Front, which stretched thousands of miles from the Black Sea in the south to Finland and the approaches to the Arctic Circle in the north.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa, the Luftwaffe led the way with approximately 440 Me-109 types.

Eastern Front

The Luftwaffe Me-109F vs. the Red Army’s Yak-1

By Ray Denkhaus

By the summer of 1942, the venerable and battle-proven Messerschmitt 109E was all but replaced by the improved Me-109F in front-line units. Read more

A German panzer crew works on its Tiger I during the long Russian winter as German infantry marches past with a horse-drawn vehicle. By the war's end more than one million horses were still hauling German personnel, artillery, and ammunition.

Eastern Front

Horses & The Mechanized Myth of the Eastern Front

By John Perry

Advances in military technology, including tanks, jets, and rockets, are among the popular images of Nazi Germany during World War II. Read more

Fans should be aptly pumped for the first stand-alone multiplayer release in the Company of Heroes franchise.

Eastern Front

New Game Releases: Company of Heroes: The Western Front Armies

by Joseph Luster

Company of Heroes 2 made a decent splash when it arrived in June of last year, placing players on the Eastern Front of World War II. Read more

Eastern Front

Innovative Soviet Fighter Ace

By Christopher J. Chlon

According to contemporary Soviet news sources, fighter Ace Alexander Pokryshkin was the most famous pilot in the Red Air Force during World War II. Read more

Eastern Front

Panzer Fury in Hungary

By John E. Spindler

Even in the dark days of March 1945, when the Third Reich was on the brink of collapse, its troops managed to exhibit that grim humor that enables frontline soldiers to endure the horrors of battle. Read more

Eastern Front

Storm Birds Wreak Havoc

By Phil Zimmer

Vasily Emelianenko led a flight of Soviet Ilyushin IL-2 Shturmoviks, or “Storm Birds,” in late June 1942 against a German-held airfield near Artemovsk in eastern Ukraine, flying low up a deep ravine to avoid detection. Read more

Eastern Front

Panzer General Strachwitz

By Ludwig H. Dyck

The wide tracks of Soviet T-34S and colossal KV-1S crunched through the snow. Night had fallen west of Belgorod on March 15, 1943. Read more

The SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was formed during the 1930s as Hitler’s personal bodyguard and later grew into a division of the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the organization. In this photo from the early days of the Leibstandarte, soldiers pass in review as their commander gives the Nazi salute.

Eastern Front

The Waffen-SS: Evolution of Armed Evil

By Allyn Vannoy

In 1933, before the Waffen-SS, there was a portion of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel (SS), armed and trained along military lines and served as an armed force. Read more

Eastern Front

The Imperial War Museum

By Roy Stevenson

Although Britain has a number of war museums, the Imperial War Museum (IWM) is acknowledged as the Holy Grail of them all—the one you must visit when in London. Read more

Eastern Front

Field Marshal Erich von Manstein at Kursk: An Impossible Victory

By Valor Dodd

At daybreak on Monday, July 12, 1943, SS Sturmbannführer Christian Bachmann, the panzer group commander of the 3rd SS Panzergrenadier Division, ordered his unit to cross the Psel River and attack. Read more

Eastern Front

Escape from Kirovograd

By Pat Mactaggart

The waning months of 1943 were a bleak time for the German forces in southern Russia. Since the massive battle at Kursk in July, the Red Army had pushed the armies of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Army Group South hundreds of kilometers to the west. Read more

Eastern Front

Race to the Panther Line: Final Liberation of Leningrad

By Pat Mctaggart

The latter half of 1943 had German forces in the east staggering under a series of hammer blows that saw the Soviet Red Army advance hundreds of kilometers westward on the central and southern sectors of the Eastern Front. Read more

Eastern Front

The Soviet Winter Offensive: From the Vistula to the Oder

By Henrik Lunde The Situation in the East, Summer 1944

The area between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains had been relatively quiet since the end of Operation Bagration late in the summer of 1944. Read more

In August 1944, the Allies followed up the massive Normandy Invasion with another in southern France known as Operation Dragoon.

Eastern Front

Rampage on the Riviera: Operation Dragoon

By Glenn Barnette and André Bernole

Early in 1944, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the defeated hero of North Africa and now head of Army Group B in France, was tasked with strengthening the Atlantic Wall defenses against Allied invasion. Read more